Journey to the Heart of Céline

Unavoidably, our perceptions of a foreign literature are distorted, skewed by imperfect knowledge of the tradition it comes out of as much as by the otherness of the culture itself, removes of time, or ways of thinking that a specific language encircles and makes possible.

With Céline, the distortion is of another order altogether. First, he became in his lifetime, quite apart from his books and in fact eclipsing them, a figure; and it is that image above all – Nazi symathizer, anti-Semite, physician of the gutters, pen dripping with swill and hatred – that has come down to us. This is the only Céline most English-language readers know, if they know him at all.

Second in his accounting, and of far greater significance, are the distortions offered up by Céline himself. For his literary method (in that he had one) was based on distortion, a kind of high caricature really, exaggerating out of all proportion some elements, suppressing others, rendering the whole thing down to a series of staccato, breathless phrases at once bridged and isolated by those ellipses dotting his pages, in their intensity and abrupt shifts visually telegraphic.

The life was like that as well, a discontinuous thing of impulse, folly and feints; of flight and exile; disenchantment; rage. "Céline, or Velocity ... There is the velocity of language, of course. He is the man who bevels sentences, disarticulates syntax, who warps and straightens words so as to hurl them at great speed toward emotion, the ultimate target. But that is not all. There is also, first and foremost, the velocity of his life (and to retell that is to throw oneself into frenetic pursuit)."

The biographer's problem, then, becomes twofold: What are the truths behind the distortions of Céline's reputation, and the sometimes synonymous, sometimes discrete distortions of his work; and secondly, what are the sources of these distortions? Further, in regard to his work, were the distortions of primarily literary motive – the sort of borrowings and reorderings every novelist employs – or were they perhaps, even more, attempts to rebuild, or in some other way retrieve, the life itself?

Louis-Ferdinand Destouches was born in 1894, the year of Dreyfus's condemnation, though three more years went by before, with the first intimations of Dreyfus's innocence, the Affair began, pitching defenders of the established order, the military and organized anti-Semites against "intellectuals" (this word in fact just then emerging into common use). Destouches became Céline in 1932 with publication of Journey to the End of Night, followed four years later by Death on the Installment Plan. Both books, and those that follow, deal with the materials of his own life: childhood in the pastoral village Courbevoie as a shopkeeper's son, the brutal intrusions of World War I, wanderings in Europe, Africa and America, medical training and practice among Paris's poor, exile to Denmark and eventual imprisonment in the final years of the Third Reich; amnesty and literary enshrinement.

For Céline was not only a witness to his time. He was, most assuredly, that; and a momentous time it was, the very beginning of life as we know it, global, historical life carried on beneath the dark tent of the Holocaust and the sure knowledge it provides of what we're capable of. But he was also the progenitor of a line of writers at the edge, making possible (as George Steiner has remarked) the work of such disparate figures as William Boroughs and Günter Grass.

Frederic Vitoux's Céline: A Biography (Paragon House, 1992) is, quite rightfully, part of a European Sources series from Paragon House. Originally published in France in 1988 and recipient there of a Goncourt Award, it has been admirably translated by Jesse Browner.

Biographer Vitoux, already a celebrated authority, surely has here the last word on Céline. His book is a marvel of research, of inclusiveness and discursive narration. It is also a marvel of balance, with the biographer, rather like his subject (and for all his obvious passion) standing forever curiously apart from the observing.

Céline, Vitoux demonstrates, was from the first a man of severe contradiction. Raised "according to aristocratic prinicples and with proletarian means," he was drawn on the one hand to the maternal side of his family – practical, frugal, respectful of established order – and on the other, to his father's side, all those dreamy, penniless Destouches clinging to tatters of a specious nobility. The adult "seesaw Céline," staggering between depiction of a heavy, sordid reality and desperate flight from that same reality, simply recapitulates this. Céline's work, historical though it was, Vitoux tells us, is never so much a remembrance of things past as it is an ongoing escape from the present.

With great nostalgia for the ordered time preceding his birth, Céline knew that he could never retrieve that time, and so he began furiously to slam doors, creating "a style that dynamites the lovely turn of phrase, pulverizes syntax, shatters the florid rhetoric of yesteryear." Style as subversion.

It was, Vitoux observes, an effort to be repeated again and again, obsessively – and so we have all these novels overlapping one another like Venn diagrams, all these versions of the same truth, all these Célines.

Any biography is an unrealized quest, part reportage, part detective story, part apology. If at the end of Vitoux's watershed work we still fail to know Céline fully, it has nothing to do with Vitoux's labors or insight, and everything to do with the simple fact that finally each of us remains a mystery. As much as anything, it is in this very paradox that art originates. And it's in recognition of this that biographer Vitoux chooses his epigraph from novelist Céline: "Mystery is the only life of the soul."

First published in Washington Post Book World (28 June 1992).